simulating daily temperatures

simulating daily temperatures

Description

Given some historical high, low, and mean temperatures for a certain month of the year, how could a full month of temperatures be somewhat realistically simulated? The recipe among the few that were tried that produced the best results turned out to be this:

1. Obtain simulated high, low and mean temperatures within the bounds suggested by the empirical data.
2. Assign the high and low temperatures to two random days in the month.
3. Assign a random temperature between the high and the low to the first and last days of the month if they haven't yet been assigned a temperature.
4. For each remaining day, take the value at the intersection of the line connecting the two anchor temperatures, vary it by some random amount in a random direction between 0 and the value, and assign the result as the temparature for that day.
5. transform the resulting values to the desired mean.

A demo that performs this process displays the results using plotchart is here .

Page Authors

PYK

Original author.